An engaging but somewhat placid mystery with a feline sleuth.
In this third installment of a series, a Midwestern architect and a clever cat are pulled back into the detective game when a Hollywood movie—and a Hollywood murder—comes to town.
Architect and amateur sleuth Brody Norris is building his dream home in Dumont, Wisconsin, with his husband (and former uncle by marriage), Marson Miles. Brody is also catsitting for his friend Mary Questman while she’s out of town: a welcome chance to spend extra time with his favorite talking Abyssinian cat, Mister Puss. But the real excitement in Dumont is that the favorite local son, Hollywood actor Thad Manning, has returned to direct a film based on his childhood there. The citizens of Dumont are invited to serve as extras—and there’s even a role for a certain feline. As is typical in Dumont, nothing ever goes without a hitch, and the production soon suffers from the tragic death of the crew electrician. Brody’s friend Sheriff Thomas Simms suspects foul play, and it isn’t long before the architect and Mister Puss are pulled into the investigation. Thad and his production have more enemies than one might expect—he and his wife, the billionaire heiress Paige Yeats, have designs in Dumont beyond the movie—and, to make everything even more stressful, Brody’s mother, the combative lesbian Inez Norris, has come back to town. Craft writes in typically polished prose, illustrating his characters with precision and humor, as when Brody describes Inez: “I hadn’t seen her in three years, but even at a distance, I could see she hadn’t changed much…a hippie of sorts, older and wiser. She wore leotards with an East Indian tunic and a billowing mohair stole to ward off the chill of a late-October afternoon.” Despite the familiar touches, this latest volume is perhaps not quite as gripping or colorful as the previous entrants in the series—it takes its time getting going, and the mystery element is somewhat sidelined by other drama. (Perhaps part of the problem is that the novelty of a talking cat and Brody’s May-December marriage have lost a bit of their shine.) Even so, fans of Mister Puss will likely still enjoy this personality-filled and altogether pleasant sojourn in Dumont.
An engaging but somewhat placid mystery with a feline sleuth.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 263
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
